El Salvador Military Officials

In a case that revisited U.S. involvement in Central America's bloody civil wars, a federal jury on Friday found that two retired Salvadoran generals could not be held responsible for the 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen. The verdict by a 10-member jury in West Palm Beach drew gasps of disbelief from the slain women's relatives, who have tried for years to hold the two men liable for the killings carried out by Salvadoran national guardsmen under their command.

In a case that revisited U.S. involvement in Central America's bloody civil wars, a federal jury on Friday found that two retired Salvadoran generals could not be held responsible for the 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen. The verdict by a 10-member jury in West Palm Beach drew gasps of disbelief from the slain women's relatives, who have tried for years to hold the two men liable for the killings carried out by Salvadoran national guardsmen under their command.

El Salvador military officials reported 135 casualties in fighting between government troops and leftist rebels last week. Thirty guerrillas were killed and 51 wounded, it said, adding that four soldiers were killed and 50 wounded. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front said it inflicted 126 casualties on the army in the same period. It gave no total of rebel losses.

Instead of Nicaragua, substitute El Salvador or Guatemala. Instead of the two murders Kirkpatrick attributes to the Sandinistas (former Contra leader Enrique Bermudez and Jean-Paul Genie, a 16-year-old), substitute the tens of thousands of Salvadoran or Guatemalan murder victims--prominent politicians to impoverished campesinos --of military or police death squads armed by the United States.

A former top Salvadoran intelligence officer, speaking publicly for the first time, said El Salvador's senior military officials cooperated in creation of right-wing death squads five years ago to purge the government of leftists. Ex-Col.

Stopped by national guardsmen at a rural roadblock, the women were abducted, raped and murdered, each executed with a rifle shot to the head. The December 1980 killings of Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan took place near the start of El Salvador's 12-year civil war, a conflict in which more that 75,000 civilians died. Nearly two decades after the deaths put a U.S.